Parenting in a Moroccan Dutch ‘World’: Exploring and challenging cultural boundaries through the narratives of highly educated Moroccan Dutch individuals

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my participants, who took valuable time out of their busy lives to share their thoughts and experiences with me. The uncertainty of COVID-19 conditions resulted in many frank and vulnerable conversations, and I am grateful to have been able to get to know you and your stories.

Thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Apostolos Andrikopoulos. Your consistent support and calming advice across email and Skype were invaluable.

Thank you to the lovely friends and family who provided (virtual) hugs and cathartic conversations during this process, you kept me going when it all felt overwhelming.

Finally, thank you to Luke. Your never-ending encouragement and belief in my abilities, your creative suggestions, and your infinite patience, have been a source of inspiration and determination.

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Front cover: Many thanks to Samira Charroud for allowing me to reproduce her illustration, ‘Chaos and Structure’ (2018). Charroud’s piece explores the differences between ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Dutch’ cultures in dealing with time and in relating to the environment, through the perspective of Moroccan migrants’ journeys, with the central hourglass representing the way the cultures

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Introduction

My husband has the same where we’re second generation, we're both highly educated, we can play and be more flexible in that sense, so when we have to be really Dutch, we can be really Dutch, and when we don't have to be really Dutch, we can be ourselves. We're more flexible in that sense, but it's, I can understand for people who are not in that position or don't want to play that game, because it is a game you play. (Imane, emphasis in original)

How do Moroccan Dutch individuals discuss parenting in relation to being ‘highly educated’, ‘Dutch’, and ‘ourselves’? Imane,1_{a university lecturer and mother of three, suggested that she} felt a level of control over how she presented her cultural identity to the outside world. Rather than painting the ‘stereotypes, that they [the Dutch] have regarding language or culture’ as a restriction on her parenting behaviour, she narrated this as a site of strategising.

Imane’s ‘game’ analogy encapsulates multiple themes running through this thesis. First and foremost, it draws our attention to the agency exercised in narrating one’s experience of externally determined cultural boundaries. Imane chose to speak the language of flexibility, crediting her empowered position to growing up in the Netherlands and reaching a high level of education, relative to those ‘who are not in that position’. In doing so, she touched upon another theme in this thesis: resources. She suggested that she is lucky to have both socio-economic resources (coming from higher education), and cultural resources (knowing how to be ‘Dutch’), which she and her husband use to navigate between being ‘really Dutch’ and being ‘ourselves’ (this quote is further analysed in Chapter II). Finally, her reminder that some people ‘don’t want to play that game’, even if they have the ability, re-iterates that narratives are highly personal creations.

This thesis investigates parenting as a microcosm through which to understand the concepts of cultural belonging, category politics, and intergenerational change among Moroccan Dutch individuals who have experienced upward social mobility. Parenting provides a tangible lived experience, involving daily interactions and decisions, in which to situate these concepts. Moreover, discussions of parenting facilitate reflections across family generations: in narrating their own upbringing, their current views and practices, and their future parenting aspirations, individuals explore their relationship to their family’s history of migration.

1_{All participants have been anonymised to protect their privacy, and were able to choose their own}

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2 *

I first became interested in this subject through thinking about the concept of boundaries. Within sociology, and especially within migration studies, there is a tendency towards

categorising people and their identities from the perspective of the nation-state, a proclivity that has been coined ‘methodological nationalism’ for its reinforcement of culture and ethnicity as defining (and therefore politicising) features of the nation-state (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). To move away from such mindsets, Desmond (2014) has called on ethnographers to study ‘fields rather than places, boundaries rather than bounded groups, processes rather than processed people, and cultural conflict rather than group culture’ (p.548), proposing that we can learn as much, if not more, about the meaning of social entities and identities through their contested edges as their insides. Within migration and policy studies, it has already been shown that increasingly restrictive immigration policies reflect far more on the idealised citizens and family norms envisaged by the state than the characteristics of migrants themselves (see for instance, Moret, Andrikopoulos & Dahinden, 2019).

It follows that we could learn about the complexities of cultural belonging by studying individuals who experience the boundaries of several categories at once: highly educated individuals of Moroccan origin in the Netherlands could be seen to occupy a liminal space, at the intersection between boundaries of culture, nationhood, and class. Moreover, due to being socially mobile this group does not fit dominant stereotypes about Moroccan descendants in the Netherlands (see below), opening an analytical space in which to explore and challenge cultural boundaries.

Public stereotyping of the Moroccan Dutch population has taken an especially negative turn in the past 20 years, with policy creating a public issue out of so-called failed ‘integration’. This logic is upheld by a culturalist civic integration discourse which places cultures linked to Islam beneath a reconstructed white, ‘progressive’, and ‘tolerant’ Dutchness (Duyvendak & Scholten, 2012; Mepschen, 2018; Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018; Mouritsen, Jensen & Larin, 2019). This policy shift has been paralleled across North-Western Europe and exacerbated by the rise of public Islamophobia and the subsequent association of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands with Islam (Kaya, 2009). This ‘outsider’ narrative is not only applied to

first-generation incoming migrants, however. Racialised and classed notions of the ‘unassimilable Other’ are often retrospectively applied to families who have been settled in the Netherlands for several decades, thus projecting new exclusionary rhetoric onto the descendants of migrants (Bonjour & Duyvendak, 2018). These constructions of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, especially within policy on migrant families, serve to construct and reconstruct Dutch national identity, simultaneously producing and reproducing stereotypes about parents and families with visible migrant origins

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3 (Bonjour & De Hart, 2013). Since this integration discourse is tied to idealised notions of the ‘good’ citizen, Moroccan parents and parenting strategies have been a particular area of focus in policy and the media, seen as the primary socialisers of future Dutch citizens (Van den Berg & Duyvendak, 2012; Van Reekum & Van den Berg, 2018).

While there has been extensive scholarship on the nature of this criticism, there has been relatively limited research into how (or even whether) Moroccan Dutch parents and prospective parents encounter and navigate these pressures in their everyday life. Grillo’s (2008) assertion that meanings of family arrangements and practices are ‘earnestly debated by migrants as much as anyone’ (p.14) suggests that the descendants of migrants take an active role in questioning and creating family life. Moving away from scholarship on the integration debate, drawing on the concepts of family practices, display, and performance (Morgan, 2011; Finch, 2007; Strasser, Kraler, Bonjour & Bilger, 2009) and cultural translation (De Haan 2011; Van Beurden & De Haan, 2019) among others, this thesis attempts to redress the balance from the bottom-up. Intersecting the negotiation of cultural boundaries are changes in class position. The majority of families of Moroccan origin in the Netherlands formed through the migration of ‘guest workers’ to Dutch factories in the 1960s and 70s, followed by further family reunification migration (Stock, 2017). The trajectories of the children of these migrants have been the subject of social and academic scrutiny, having grown up in a cross-cultural environment and in most cases received a much higher level of education than their parents (this scrutiny is further elaborated in the Literature Review). A disproportionately small number of these descendants have managed to acquire university degrees and continue on to professional careers (Kaya, 2009, outlines the socio-economic context of ‘structural outsiderism’ which exists in the Netherlands, where, in the early 2000s, chances of reaching university-level education were three times lower for Moroccan and Turkish Dutch than ‘native’ Dutch, p.136). Nevertheless, Slootman (2014) argues that those who do reach these educational and career levels are ‘pioneering climbers’, creating new ‘minority middle-class capital’, involving the reinvention and

reassertion of ethnic identity, rather than its gradual decline (p.67). This thesis probes whether ‘minority middle-class capital’ emerges within parenting narratives as well: do Moroccan Dutch individuals link experiences of upward social mobility with comments on parenting? Does this give people a greater sense of ‘flexibility’ when managing diverse cultural expectations and parenting strategies?

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4 In an effort to place participants’ voices at the heart of my analysis, the central research

question foregrounds how individuals narrativise and give meaning to parenting practices, rather than dissecting practices per se:

How are parenting strategies and performances narrativised by highly educated Moroccan Dutch individuals?

To answer this question, I took a qualitative approach, interviewing 15 Moroccan Dutch adults, who were either parents themselves (with children up to age 16), or young professionals (where interviews focused on childhood experiences and future children). This variation enabled conversations to span past, present, and future. An intentionally broad understanding of ‘Moroccan Dutch’ was taken to move away from strict nation-based thinking: many

participants were born and brought up in the Netherlands, others had migrated to join their parents in the Netherlands as teenagers, while still others grew up in the Netherlands and migrated as adults to Morocco. All participants had experienced upward socio-economic mobility, having achieved a high level of education and subsequently worked in professional roles (see Methodology for detail on research design and methods).

It is important to understand that this research was conducted in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The period of active research and interviewing during March and April 2020 occurred as social distancing measures were applied by governments across Europe to control the spread of the virus. As well as requiring a re-design of research methodology, this meant that participants were experiencing a period of high instability, with work and childcare

patterns in flux, and ongoing fear about the health of at-risk relatives. Whether it be the death of family member caused by the coronavirus, an older parent stranded alone in Morocco due to border closures, or the new stress of daily tasks (such as a single mother having to leave her children home alone during supermarket trips), the uncertainty and vulnerability inherent in a global pandemic is prominent in my data.

This thesis is structured around the central idea of ‘worlds’. It is not an attempt to cement notions of separate worlds veering towards an inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’ (see Ghorashi, 2014, p.103). Rather, it is an explicit attempt to break open the notion of ‘worlds’ and

demonstrate its usefulness when individualised and de-essentialised. Placing individuals at the centre of a metaphorical, personalised ‘world’ draws our attention to the way they construct their environment through narratives: a collection of multi-dimensional personal relations, cultural influences, and internal and external pressures, which must be managed and navigated. Chapter I, ‘World Modernising?’ problematises the modernisation narrative frequently used in public discourse to characterise cultural change within families of Moroccan origin in the

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5 Netherlands. In doing so, this chapter also unpacks the ways people employ the terms

‘Moroccan’ and ‘Dutch’ in relation to parenting. Chapter II, ‘World Navigating’, draws on the concept of family display to relevant ‘audiences’ to explore how people react to and navigate parenting pressures. Finally, Chapter III, ‘World Building’, investigates parenting narratives as a site to perform change and to create new forms of cultural belonging in the future. To begin our journey through these worlds, the following chapter examines the socio-political context through which Moroccan Dutch families navigate.

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6

Literature Review and Theoretical Framework

Category politics and converting the ‘Other’

Moroccan migrants and their descendants, the largest non-European immigrant community in the Netherlands, are highly stereotyped in Dutch public discourse. Deemed by the state as ‘the least accepted minority group living in the Netherlands’ over a decade ago (Social and Cultural Planning Office, 2007, cited in Verkuyten, Thijs & Stevens, 2012, p.1577), the construction of a sharp delineation between ‘Dutch’ and ‘Moroccan’ categories in the public sphere has only heightened, in tandem with the rise of public Islamophobia and reactive right-wing populist parties since the early 2000s (Roggeband & Van der Haar, 2017). Muslim migrants in Europe have been increasingly viewed in terms of their ‘religious otherness’ since international Islamic extremist terror attacks (from 9/11 in 2001 to the new wave of attacks in Europe since 2014), as well as domestic events including the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and Theo van Gogh in 2004 (Stock, 2017, p.8).2_{This tense atmosphere has prompted criticism of the Dutch} ‘multicultural’ model (outlined below), propelling the media and public policy to depict Islam as a problematic and potentially dangerous influence on society. Kaya (2009) argues that these events created a new association between Islam and the terms ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Turkish’, with generalised suspicion being extended to those of Moroccan and Turkish descent.

While ‘category politics’ (Roggeband & Van der Haar, 2017) has recently taken on a culturalist and religious edge, the phenomenon itself is nothing new. Moroccan migrants to the

Netherlands from the 1960s were treated as external to the Dutch population, due to the original assumption that they would be short-term ‘guest’ workers filling gaps in the Dutch low-skilled labour market. The fact that most workers were recruited from rural areas and had received a low level of education (70% of immigrants had not had primary education) entrenched this distinction (Van Meeteren, Van de Pol, Dekker, Engbersen & Snel, 2013). As family-related migration superseded work-based migration in the mid-1970s, with couples of Moroccan origin having children who would become Dutch citizens, the idea of the increasingly visible Moroccan population being external to the Dutch was destabilised (Kaya, 2009, p.121), and the identities and practices of descendants of migrants became a site of political and public scrutiny. It is especially significant that everyday European understandings of identity often

2_{Politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated in 2002 by a Dutch environmental activist who opposed}

Fortuyn’s scapegoating of Muslims for social problems, while activist Theo van Gogh was murdered in 2004 by a Moroccan Dutch Muslim who opposed Van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s critical film on Islam’s treatment of women.

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7 deny the legitimacy of experiencing multiple layers of belonging, to the extent that ‘children of immigrants and even their grandchildren are often assessed based on their identiﬁcation, which is regarded as an expression of loyalty, or lack thereof, to the Netherlands’ (Slootman, 2018, p.3).

The idea that identity rests on a sliding scale from ‘Moroccan’ to ‘Dutch’, with these terms being mutually exclusive, has been demonstrated by multiple studies to be fundamentally flawed. For instance, Stock (2017) shows that the meanings of ‘home’ for Moroccan and Turkish Dutch are usually multiple, spanning time and space. And yet, with the proportion of so-called ‘second generation’ Moroccans now outnumbering the first (as of December 2019 these numbers were 232,135 versus 170,357, Statistics Netherlands [CBS]),3_{and given that the intimate realm is} often where the sharpest boundaries of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ are drawn (Bonjour & De Hart, 2013), it is easy to see how the family has become a key site of problematisation and Othering.

Most significantly, recent shifts in policy attitudes portray migrants and their descendants as responsible both for their Otherness and their ‘integration’ with national norms. Mouritsen, Jensen and Larin (2019) identify an ideological turn within North-Western European

immigration policies since the 1990s, including a focus on personal conduct and values in civic integration policies for incoming migrants, and the application of ‘civic integration’ ideology in domestic policies, from labour market regulations to teaching. In the Dutch context in particular, citizenship discourse has become moralised and culturalised through attacks on the supposed ‘multicultural’ political project of the past, with migrant communities (and cultures) now envisaged in Dutch social imagination as residing ‘outside’ a ‘morally cleansed’ society (Schinkel, 2013). In fact, scholars have demonstrated that the ‘multicultural model’ is more accurately understood as an ex-post construction of policy reformers, who exaggerate its consistency in order to legitimise the current push-back (Duyvendak & Scholten, 2012; Scholten, 2013).

Crucially, this civic integration discourse is classed, racialised, and gendered, with parents held responsible for raising their children in the so-called ‘wrong’ – and by implication, anti-Dutch – environment. Bonjour and Duyvendak (2018) argue that ‘European “imagined communities” and their “unwanted Others” are thoroughly classed’: Dutchness is characterised as white,

3_{We should be wary of taking these statistics at face value, since the distinction between ‘first generation’}

and ‘second generation’ is arbitrary, with second generation defined by CBS as a ‘person born in the Netherlands who has at least one parent born abroad’: not only does this count all people who migrated to the Netherlands before adulthood - and therefore attended Dutch schools - as first-generation, a categorisation which many would dispute, it also permanently ties people to one of their parents’ countries of origin, formalising an insider/outsider dynamic among people whose main frame of reference is the Netherlands. These statistics are used here as an indication only, and are not taken to represent the size or diversity of migration experience of the Moroccan Dutch population.

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8 middle-class, with ‘highly modern and progressive’ values, while both incoming and settled non-Western migrants are marked as inherently (and therefore racially) tied to ‘poor prospects’ (p.884, 897). These Dutch ‘post-progressive’ values, as Mepschen (2018) labels them, are less representative of national culture and more emblematic of a reconstructed Dutchness, which recasts long-fought-for progress in LGBTQIA rights as ‘inherently Dutch’ and uses this as a tool to define citizenship (p.22). This is echoed in the invocation of women’s rights by

Euro-American political parties (typically right-wing) and immigration policies, recasting ‘Western’ women as ‘emancipated’ and women from Muslim cultures as ‘unemancipated’, the latter deemed passive pawns oppressed by their husbands (see Farris on ‘Femonationalism’, 2017). This binary embeds cultural stereotypes both into policy, for instance through the exclusion of migrants to the Netherlands if their marriage is deemed on the wrong side of the constructed ‘sham/genuine’ dichotomy (Andrikopoulos, 2019), and into public discourse and social interactions, where the perceived gender roles of families of Muslim origin are used to place them outside the Dutch ‘imagined national community’ (Bonjour & De Hart, 2013).

To be part of said community, parents are publicly pressured to raise their children in line with reconstructed Dutchness (which some argue is a type of ‘cruel optimism’, since migrants are perpetually narrated as being in a state of ‘postponed arrival’, Boersma & Schinkel, 2018, p.322). For instance, the Dutch immigration department’s film Naar Nederland at one point shows footage of a group of predominantly non-white teenagers chatting outside whilst the narrator states that school drop-outs are a result of ‘not coping well’ with cultural differences between school and home environments, leading to unemployment, and possibly drug dealing and stealing (Ministrie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid [SZW], Naar Nederland Film).4 This film is still used to test non-Western immigrants as part of their conditions for entry (SZW, Exam Programme, 2014). In this segment, a causational line is drawn between non-Dutch culture and socio-economic difficulties, supporting Bonjour & Duyvendak’s (2018) thesis that racialised and culturalised ‘unwanted Others’ are conceptually linked to bringing social ‘issues’. Taken to its conclusion, this causal relationship would carry down familial generations until the supposedly problematic culture was erased and replaced with ambiguous ‘Dutchness’. From poverty to educational disparities, parents are frequently responsibilised for social inequalities deemed ‘integration’ problems. For instance, ‘Moroccan youngsters’ are characterised as delinquent by members of all major parties in parliamentary debates, often attributed to a perceived ‘parenting “deficit”’ in need of correction (Roggeband & Van der Haar, 2017, p.81).

4_{Full quotation: ‘Some children leave school too early. This is because they are not coping well with the}

differences between their upbringing at home, the way lessons are given at school, and how they interact with friends on the street. If they don’t have a diploma, they are usually unable to get work. But to get their hands on some money, they may steal, or deal in drugs.’ (1:11:30 - 1:11:53).

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9 Moreover, the focus of academic research has often validated the notion of differing parenting cultures as a ‘problem’. A study demonstrating this on multiple levels is Van der Veen and Meijnen’s (2002) investigation into the parent-child relations of ‘successful’ Moroccan and Turkish Dutch students (in a context where ethnic-minority students are most often streamed into schools which do not qualify them for automatic progression to tertiary education). Including ‘Dutch’ students in the study as a point of comparison only, and phrasing the key research questions as ‘What is the difference between successful students from a Turkish or Moroccan background and successful students from a Dutch background in their upbringing and in the quality of the relationship with their parents?’ (pp.306-307, emphasis added), pre-establishes national-cultural background (note, in a Dutch/non-Dutch binary) as the driver for parenting behaviour, precluding the possibility for discussions of cross-cultural variables to take the fore in conclusions. In addition, using parenting to understand the ‘success’ of students implies that parenting (with the implication of cultural background) is also to blame for poorly performing students. Taking a similar tone, Kalmijn and Kraaykamp’s (2018) study on

correlations between parental ‘assimilation’ with Dutch culture and their (adult) children’s social conservatism reinforces the idea that cultural heterogeneity leads to non-‘progressive’ (by implication, ‘non-Dutch’) values. Both examples demonstrate the pivotal role that

designating research objectives plays in continuing – and thus, combatting – ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002).

The notion of incompatible (and thus problematic) family cultures is further reinforced in academia through attempts to categorise families into determinist ‘camps’. This is exemplified in the development and application of the Individualism-Collectivism model (IC) (Hofstede, 1980, cited in Huiberts et al., 2006).5_{Whilst it is interesting to analyse the ways this framework} influences or reflects the attitudes of policy-makers towards diverse family relations (for instance, Degni, Pöntinen & Mölsä, 2006, used it to advise on interactions between Finnish social workers and Somali migrants), danger arises when this model is treated as a

straightforward dichotomy. In Huiberts et al.’s (2006) comparative investigation of adolescent-parent relations among Moroccan and Turkish Dutch adolescents compared to ‘autochthonous’ Dutch, only two models alongside the IC dichotomy were considered: the ‘western model’ (hypothesising that an ‘authoritarian’ parenting style creates emotional distance between parents and children) and the ‘contextual model’ (hypothesising that ‘authoritarian’ parenting can coexist with closeness due to living in unfavourable circumstances). Given these narrow

5_{The IC model determines generalised differences between family characteristics, seeing them as geared}

towards either a ‘collective’ mindset, or an ‘individual’ mindset. For example, ‘In individualistic societies people pursue a more egalitarian distribution of power [...] In a collectivistic society relationships are not only very close but they are also hierarchical’ (Huiberts et al., 2006, p.316).

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10 options, it is unsurprising that most support was found for the IC model of family relations. However, that results were not consistent across age and gender demonstrates some fundamental flaws in the IC model: it assumes wrongly that (simplified) cultural norms in countries of origin are transplanted, unchanging, into migratory contexts, superseding other societal categories. Unproblematised and simplified dichotomies such as the IC model must

especially be questioned when applied hierarchically in public discourse. Indeed, there is a

lacuna in research investigating the perception and impact of such dichotomies among Moroccan Dutch parents, who, by this model, would exist somewhere in between the two ‘camps’.

Demonstrating Dutchness

Having established that families of migrant origin are often cast as divergent from ‘Dutchness’ by political, media, and even some academic sources (if unintentionally), it is important to analyse what is expected of parents to address this so-called ‘problem’ and appear more ‘Dutch’. The following demonstrates that, along with being expected to adopt nominally progressive social values to pass on to their children, parents must demonstrate their ‘activation’ as ‘good’ parents, showing that they are doing parenting itself in a ‘Dutch’ way.

Research into ‘activation’ initiatives reveals that the pressure to become an ‘active’ citizen, conforming one’s private life to normative standards in order to legitimise one’s membership of society, is on the rise across Western Europe (see Tonkens, 2012, on citizenship regimes). Within this shift, the boundaries between public and private are especially blurred for families with a history of migration, who regularly come under state and societal scrutiny over their level of ‘assimilation’ (Kofman, Kraler, Kohli & Schmoll, 2011). The notion of needing to actively demonstrate one’s belonging is clearly visible in state-sponsored parenting programmes in Rotterdam, which focus on practising the way parents should perform their relationship to their child, through group debates and ‘tolerant’ discussion, presented in opposition to

‘authoritarian’, ‘traditional’ (read: Muslim) discipline methods (Van Reekum & Van den Berg, 2015). This suggests that to prove their newfound ‘activation’, parents are expected to publicly perform and thus legitimise their act of ‘catching up’ (temporally and geographically) to the more ‘modern’ parenting techniques in an idealised ‘Dutch society’ (Van den Berg, 2016, p.22, 25). This hierarchical binary is part of a broader ‘umbrella’ binary of modern/pre-modern which runs throughout public conceptions of Moroccan parenting strategies (explored in Chapter I).

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11 Moreover, the ‘activation’ process is distinctly gendered. For instance, the terms ‘parents’ and ‘women’ are used interchangeably in some of Rotterdam’s parenting policy briefs (dating from the early 2000s), and migrant mothers are often the primary target of initiatives aimed at integrating migrants into Dutch society (Van den Berg, 2013, pp.97-98). This is due to an implicit (and sometimes explicit) link between mothers and the future of the nation: not only are mothers biologically reproducing the nation, they are also held up as central to its social and

cultural reproduction (Yuval‐Davis, 1996; Van Reekum & Van den Berg, 2018). Tellingly, the

Dutch government’s announcement of stricter measures for family migration in October 2009 used the language of women’s ‘emancipation’ and protection to justify banning their entry into the country if their marriage was not deemed suitably egalitarian, stating ‘there is a risk that they cannot adequately raise their children to become full/complete citizens’ (Rijksoverheid, 2009). This re-definition of being ‘emancipated’ as a personal characteristic, rather than a situational one, permeates Dutch migration policies on family formation and reunification, as well as domestic ‘integration’ policies, extending down to the local level. In the urban

regeneration of Rotterdam as a place of opportunity, women have been placed as symbolically ‘mothering’ the new city into existence (Van den Berg, 2013), with migrant women in particular being expected to ‘emancipate’ themselves (thus becoming more ‘Dutch’) in the process (Van den Berg & Duyvendak, 2012).

The existence of a public notion of what Moroccan Dutch motherhood is (‘unemancipated’) and

should be (‘emancipated’) implies that there exists an idea of Moroccan Dutch fatherhood. In

other words, motherhood is only one side of a gendered coin.6_{Whilst fathers are less frequently} the targets of Dutch emancipatory narratives, and many ‘constructions of migrant masculinity’ paint migrant men as domineering, ‘denied’ of both ‘humanity and vulnerability’ (Bonjour & De Hart, 2013, p.73), some local interventions take a more sympathetic (if paternalist) approach. Van Huis and Van der Haar’s (2013) research into 23 projects designed to help men (of both migrant backgrounds and non-migrant backgrounds) perceived to be on the margins of society (due to a lack of ‘participation’ in work and/or social life) to ‘fit in’ found that they aimed to ‘coach’ them to become ideal ‘Dutchmen’ primarily through the language of ‘empowerment’. In parenting advice, empowerment took the dual form of encouraging a ‘pacified masculinity’ and more ‘involvement’ in their children’s lives, highlighting underlying assumptions that men on

6_{I am fully aware of and advocate for the interpretation of gender as a spectrum, understanding that}

people’s identities cannot be neatly categorised into the boxes of ‘male’ and ‘female’. I used ‘gendered’ here in reference to the way current social norms (and by extension, public discourse) are constructed as a binary, and thus the public idea of ‘motherhood’ goes hand in hand with its purported contrast,

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12 the so-called edges of Dutch society display more anger and less interest in their children than the majority (pp.44-47).

Having discussed gendered insider/outsider dynamics, it is worth considering broader forms exclusion, and at what point someone is perceived to be ‘on the margins’ or even ‘outside’ of society. In a political climate of increasing xenophobia and Islamophobia, are the above

stereotypes experienced by parents of migrant descent who grew up in the Netherlands – even those who, in career and social terms, fully ‘participate’ in society? Do they exist in a space

between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between idealised Dutchness and an inherited (implied inferior)

migrant culture? Do these parents feel pressure to perform their parenting in an appropriately ‘Dutch’ way to claim belonging? By focusing on individuals’ narratives of parenting strategies and performances, this thesis foregrounds individuals’ attempts to choose how they portray themselves and their family.

Indeed, recent research suggests that pressures to become as ‘Dutch’ as possible are not necessarily dominant in people’s lives. As mentioned in the introduction, Slootman (2014) places special emphasis on the position of Moroccan and Turkish descendants who have experienced upward social mobility, arguing that they create and make use of ‘minority middle-class capital’ to cultivate a sense of belonging, finding new meaning and pride in their ethnic identity by associating with co-ethnic peers who are in a similar position. This emphasis on changeable feelings of belonging, and the inadequacy of classed ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Dutch’ categories of identity, builds on Neckerman, Carter and Lee’s (1999) notion of a ‘minority culture of mobility’ among African Americans. In this version of ‘segmented assimilation’, social climbers from systemically marginalised groups create a set of new cultural characteristics to combat problems of belonging arising from racial discrimination among white majority middle classes, and inter-class tension with their minority ethnic community. Similarly, Archer (2012) demonstrated the ongoing tensions involved in creating a minority ethnic middle-class identity in England, where individuals feel excluded from the ‘authentic’ middle class perceived as exclusively white, searching for ways to appear part of the ‘respectable’ and hard-working minority middle class, whilst simultaneously avoiding coming across as ‘pretentious’ and forgetting their roots (p.35-37).

The parenting experiences of descendants of Moroccan migrants (including their thoughts on their upbringing and their own parenting views) are less well documented than those of adult migrants (who have received extensive scholarly attention, as demonstrated). Using the literature detailed above as a foundation, this thesis probes whether performing parenting in publicly defined ‘Dutch’, ‘Moroccan’, or newly created hybrid ways presents opportunities for

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13 upwardly mobile parents of Moroccan origin to challenge stereotypes, and to what extent classed and gendered experiences are recounted as playing a role in this.

Theoretical framework

To unpack individuals’ narrativisation of their ideas and experiences of parenting, this thesis draws on theories and concepts from various sociological and anthropological fields.

Within family studies, since the 1990s, there has been a push towards the notion of ‘doing’ family as an ongoing and active process. Morgan (1996; 2011) pioneered this approach, calling for ‘family practices’ to be used as a lens through which to gain new perspectives on other areas of sociological study (such as class or emotions), challenging the idea of family as a static ‘thing’ and proposing instead to approach ‘family’ as an adjective or verb (2011, p.5-6). This concept is also applicable to the study of integration pressures, where certain family practices are

constructed as troublesome in public discourse, thus deeming those who demonstrate them ‘troubling families’ (Morgan, 2019, p.2236). This highlights the manipulability of definitions of ‘good’ family practices to suit state purposes, where migrant families in particular are ‘obliged to conform to the definitions of what is a “good” family’ by performing appropriate roles and responsibilities in line with normative frameworks (Strasser, Kraler, Bonjour & Bilger, 2009, p.175; see also Duyvendak, Reinders & Wekker, 2016, for a discussion on Dutch policy-makers’ use of ‘home’ in integration discourse). The context of migration and post-migration, with its accompanying state and societal scrutiny which break down notions of a tangible public/private divide, demonstrates that family is rarely ‘done’ in an environment of equal power relations. Finch’s (2007) theory of ‘family display’ is applied in this thesis as a combination of both Morgan’s notion of active ‘practices’ and the role of external pressures and expectations. She argues that:

Display is the process by which individuals, and groups of individuals, convey to each other and to relevant audiences that certain of their actions do constitute ‘doing family things’ and thereby confirm that these relationships are ‘family’ relationships. (p.67)

Finch specifies this is especially relevant when family characteristics go against normative expectations. The notion of ‘audiences’ centres the idea that family practices do not occur in a vacuum but rather are carefully chosen and displayed in exchange for validation. While this concept has been widely taken up in family studies (see Dermott & Seymour’s edited volume,

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14 2011), it has so far seen limited application in migration studies, despite the fact that Seymour and Walsh (2013) have demonstrated its potential through a study on migrant families in Hull, England, concluding that ‘migrant groups potentially seek legitimacy from both transnational and host audiences’ (p.690). Looking at parenting narratives through the lens of ‘displaying’ to specific audiences will be a helpful tool in this thesis, reminding us that ‘displays’ can change depending on who is present.

While Finch insists her approach is more flexible than the Bulter-esque idea of performativity, which she claims implies a direct interaction between the fixed roles of actor and audience, Share, Williams and Kerrins (2018) argue that the two ideas can complement one another, especially in the realm of transnational family display. They highlight the use of Skype, where family members ‘engage as performers, directors and audiences to create meaningful

communication’ (p.3011). Moreover, Heath, McGhee and Travena (2011) criticise Finch for ‘accord[ing] greater weight to the interpretations of observers than it does to the intentions of actors’ (5.5), thus downplaying the choices made by individuals in their displays. Therefore, while Finch’s concept is insightful in presenting the idea of family display, I will focus in on

which audiences for parenting are brought up, and the level of importance ascribed to each by

my interviewees. The notion of audiences raises interesting questions when applied to families with migrant origins: how do parents negotiate different models of legitimacy? I will discuss parenting both as a ‘display’ and a ‘performance’ to recognise the ways individuals may manipulate the way they come across to their audiences.

Added to this, McKinnon (2016) reminds us from an anthropological perspective that the late-twentieth century notion of kinship-as-doing should not entirely supersede the older structural functionalist notion of kinship-as-being: ‘we should not lose sight of the diverse ways in which kinship is materialized, naturalized, objectified, and essentialized in culturally particular ways’ (p.161, emphasis in original). Indeed, she argues that what defines kinship is the tension

between doing and being. In my analysis of narratives of parenting, therefore, both

interpretations will be kept in mind: the power imbued in the label of being a ‘parent’ and what this represents (especially when it comes to notions of what a ‘good’ parent is), and the ways this role is done, practiced, and performed.

When analysing the cultural change in Moroccan Dutch families, I will be applying the framework of ‘cultural translation’ (De Haan, 2011). The complex web of choices involved in adjusting day-to-day parenting strategies to function in a new socio-cultural environment among first-generation migrants has been elaborated by migration scholars since the 1990s, who have challenged theories of linear assimilation and acculturation within family life, the supposed gradual change from the culture of the country of origin to culture of the migration

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15 destination (Foner, 1997). It is widely acknowledged that in families where parents have

migrated from a ‘non-Western’ country to Western Europe or the United States, clashes may emerge due to a ‘generation dissonance’ where children see their parents’ views on discipline, respect, and sexual relations as too strict compared to the mainstream norm they are exposed to in daily life (Foner & Dreby, 2011, p.547). However, rather than seeing these tensions as inherently problematic for parents and children, De Haan (2011) argues that the confrontation of parenting models is a productive space, which is best understood as a form of ‘cultural translation’ where both models are changed to create something new: the ‘simultaneous presence [of different parenting models] causes a constant tension, which provides a potential energy to create new solutions’ (p.395), indicating that translation requires effort on the part of all involved, and does not often go smoothly (see, for instance, Coe, 2016, on the difficulties of translating Ghanaian ‘cultural kinscripts’ into a European context).

Yet within these struggles, ‘cultural translation’ can be a route to create new forms of belonging, with post-migration parenthood acting as a ‘social learning site’ to re-interpret and give new meaning to multiple forms of knowledge, forming ‘glocalized’ parenting practices (Van Beurden & De Haan, 2019).7_{The notion of cultural re-negotiation being an additive rather than}

supplanting process (Gibson, 1988, cited in Foner, 1997, p.966) highlights the flawed simplicity of parenting ‘deficit’ and ‘modernisation’ narratives (as explored in Chapter I). Accordingly, this thesis seeks to contribute to scholarship focusing the process of change in families with migrant origins. Interestingly, De Haan’s ideas of creative tensions are predominantly based on research among first-generation migrant families, thus leaving a gap in understanding how descendants of migrants view and narrativise their parents’ practices: do they see these purely through a cultural lens? Or do they apply other frames of understanding (for instance, situational or socio-economic)? Using De Haan’s focus on the tensions and creativity within ‘cultural translation’ as a key point of departure, this thesis brings to light views on parenting as narrated by individuals who reached adulthood in a ‘Moroccan Dutch’ world.

The construction of narratives is a deliberate approach which has value in and of itself. Inspired by the biographical and narrativist turn in 21st_{century sociology, this analytical angles focuses} on self-presentation and the ‘ongoing construction of an individual’s unique standpoint’ as a tool to explore contemporary culture and social structure (Roberts, 2002, p.15). Indeed, Riessman (2012) notes that the process of narrating one’s life becomes an ‘identity-building project’ in itself (p.377), and similarly, Stock (2017) applies ‘Dialogical Self Theory’ to

7_{For clarity, the following is an example of a ‘glocalized’ practice demonstrated in Van Beurden and De}

Haan’s (2019) research: one mother likened the Dutch practice of giving pocket money to the practices of prophets in Islamic texts, in doing so creating a ‘glocalized’ practice which held meaning for her (p.5).

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16 demonstrate how personal identity is constructed through continuous ‘dialogue’ with oneself and others. While it may initially seem that this leads us away from analysing features of society in favour of a more psychological approach, the insights of narrative analysis have been

highlighted by multiple scholars. Beuving and De Vries (2015) argue that social research honours its participants the most when seeking Weberian Verstehen (understanding the world as they see it). Moreover, Phoenix and Bauer (2012) assert that a retrospective technique is ‘particularly suited to the study of non-normative lives’ (p.493) – which we could consider migrants and their descendants to have, since they are often rendered ‘non-normative’ by the dominant discourse in their society of settlement. Meanwhile, Finch (2007) suggest that

narratives are a key tool for family display, ‘provid[ing] a vehicle through which “my family” and its character can be communicated’ (p.77). This thesis considers individuals’ presentation and justification of their ideas on parenting to be crucial in understanding how their social context operates.

A note on terminology

Several terms used within this thesis have multiple, contested meanings. While many will be elaborated throughout in the context of interviewees’ answers, the following deserve some clarification. For a full breakdown of debates surrounding these terms, see Appendix 2. The ‘second generation’ debate

The term ‘second generation [immigrant]’, used across migration studies, policy, and media to refer to the children of migrants, has received recent pushback from some qualitative

researchers. For instance, Thomassen (2010), argues that the term ‘second generation’ (and even sometimes, ‘third generation’) attaches a permanent ‘immigrant’ label to people, encouraging a ‘tendency to “freeze” a whole category of people into a position that identifies them with their parents (p.28). Moreover, the use of the term in Dutch policy and government statistics emphasises place of birth as a key definer, despite the fact that many people who migrated at a young age have grown up with the Netherlands as their primary point of reference (Stock, 2017). All in all, rather than determining ‘correct’ terms, it comes down to how terms are put to use, and by whom. In light of this, I follow Stock (2017) in predominantly describing my participants as ‘descendants of migrants’ (p.15), and ‘Moroccan Dutch’, the latter term used by many researchers and descendants of migrants themselves (including my own interviewees) to describe their diverse experiences and identities.

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17 ‘Culture’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘race’

While the majority of contributors to the disciplines of History and Sociology now use ‘race’ as a category of analysis rather than a valid term in its own right, it appears that Dutch sociologists and policy-makers are distinctive for their avoidance of the term. Ostensibly linked to the Dutch ethos of ‘tolerance’, racism in its social and institutional forms are often denied by the white-majority population (noted by Deogratias, Singleton & Wojtalewicz, 2011) and even academics: the term ‘ethnicity’ is preferred, and yet, Weiner (2015) writes that ‘ethnicity [...] ﬁnds most scholars explaining immigrants’ socioeconomic disadvantage as a function of their “inferior” or “backward” cultural differences, while simultaneously obscuring the reality of institutional racism’ (p.575). In this way, the linking of ‘ethnicity’ to behaviour adds to the culturalization of discussions of migrants and their descendants (as discussed above). This thesis uses ‘culture’ to refer to sets of ideas and customs as brought up by participants, linked to various national, religious, and personal outlooks, with an explicit intention to decouple this from so-called ‘ethnicity’. However, that is not to say that experiences of racialised stereotypes and

appearance-based ‘Othering’ are not important in the lives of my participants. Given that the research design centred around parenting in order to allow comments on ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘race’ to emerge on participants’ initiative, discussions of appearance-based discrimination are analysed in moments mentioned as significant by participants.

‘Class’ and ‘social mobility’

A core element of this study is how parenting pressures and stereotypes are mediated by experiences of class. Approaching parenting from an intersectional perspective, I follow Mattis et al. (2008) in criticising scholarship which treats social identities (such as race and gender) as discrete or mutually exclusive, rather than as historically and culturally situated concepts operating within structures of power, associated with multiple other systems of representation. However, in discussing the role of ‘class’ it is important to avoid becoming overly categorical. To critically analyse labels and avoid straying into using them unquestioningly, this thesis speaks of descendants of migrants who have experienced ‘upward social mobility’ in a socio-economic sense as a result of their high-level education and subsequent careers relative to their parents’ experiences. Given that many participants did not explicitly discuss class identity, but did discuss their economic and socio-cultural resources in relation to parenting, the term ‘middle class’ is used sparingly, to refer to socio-cultural capital rather than a category of identification.

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18

Methodology

Research questions, participants, and recruitment

This thesis seeks to answer the following central question:

How are parenting strategies and performances narrativised by highly educated Moroccan Dutch individuals?

The sub-questions guiding interviews and analysis are:

1. Do parents and prospective parents of Moroccan origin use cultural and national terminology to describe parenting strategies? If so, how is this employed?

2. What significant audiences for parenting behaviour (with special focus on discipline) are identified? How do people address these?

3. How do descendants of Moroccan migrants relate to their parents as adults? 4. Are parenting strategies and performances used as tools for creating or

enacting forms of cultural belonging?

In investigating Moroccan Dutch parenting narratives, I was keenly aware that presenting the research to prospective participants as such could construct family origin as more significant to participants’ lives than it was in reality, thus shaping the emerging data based on my own preconceptions. To avoid creating a false binary of ‘Dutch’ versus ‘Moroccan’ parenting styles, and to avoid the potential for participants to feel ‘Othered’ by the research process, I presented my research as investigating parenting views among ‘highly educated’ individuals (also in keeping with Wimmer & Glick Schiller’s call to avoid research designs based on a national ‘container model’ of society, instead using other variables such as class, gender, or politics to frame studies on migration, 2002, pp.225, 233). This approach allowed participants to voluntarily bring up ‘cultural’ and ‘ethnic’ identification, or pressures and stereotypes, when

significant to them without being artifacts of the research design, and without having the

category of ‘Moroccan’ imposed upon them.8

The data for this thesis are gathered from 15 in-depth interviews with highly educated

Moroccan Dutch parents and non-parents, averaging about 60 minutes in length (ranging from 40 to 100 minutes). The 9 parents interviewed were aged between their early 30s and mid-40s

8_{Two participants who directly asked or for whom further information was necessary to explain why I}

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19 and had children aged 2-16, while the 6 non-parents were aged between their mid-20s and early 30s. I was aware that when reflecting on their upbringing, this age range may have

resulted in participants referring to different socio-political contexts (bearing in mind the rise of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant discourse in Europe in the past 20 years). However, in

practice, no noticeable differences emerged on this front.

In terms of gender balance, 10 interviewees were women (including 6 mothers) and 5 were men (including 3 fathers). Given that research on Moroccan Dutch parenthood has often focused on women and mothers, viewed by the state as key to the ‘integration’ of future Dutch citizens (see Literature Review), it is notable that one third of participants here are men. As Stock (2017) notes, public and academic focus on ‘problematic’ or ‘extraordinary’ behaviour among those of migrant origin can render the voices of ‘normal’ Moroccan Dutch men invisible (p.24). Another dynamic is that studies on Dutch parenting courses often only have access to mothers, since mothers are far more likely to take children to school and to look after them during the day (Van den Berg, 2013, p.111). In this respect, the online format of my research turned out to facilitate conversations with people who might not normally be accessible through parenting groups, including fathers and parents of all genders who work full-time.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of the research process significantly impacted research methods, due to both government-imposed restrictions and ethical concerns. My initial intention to recruit participants through organisations linked to Moroccan Dutch families and student networks was redesigned in light of social distancing measures put in place by the Dutch government on 15th_{March 2020 to address the rapid spread of the virus. These} included among other restrictions, the closure of childcare and education sites (except for the children of key workers), requirements to work from home wherever possible, to maintain at least 1.5 metres away from people outdoors, and to avoid seeing friends and family. These measures meant that it was no longer possible to approach potential participants face-to-face, since it would not have been ethically sound to increase people’s risks of catching or spreading the virus, or indeed to risk my own health in the research process.

Instead, participants were recruited online via LinkedIn, a professional networking social media site. A purposive sampling method was used to seek out participants who fit the criteria of being highly educated (defined as having received a bachelor’s degree) and of Moroccan descent (defined as having at least one parent of Moroccan origin). Due to being unable to know from people’s online profiles whether they were parents, the target group was broadened to include non-parents who would be able to discuss their own upbringing and their hopes for their future children (should they desire them). Potential participants were found via the ‘alumni’ tab on the LinkedIn pages of universities and hogeschools (Dutch universities of applied sciences which

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20 also award bachelor’s degrees) based in the four most populous cities in the Netherlands: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht. Within each ‘alumni’ section, search results were filtered to show those with common surnames of Moroccan origin.9_{Selecting only those} who had graduated, I sent messages explaining my research to a total of 267 individuals who had graduated from 11 different institutions. Of these, 83 people accepted to ‘connect’ with me on LinkedIn. Finally, 15 interviews were organised via this method (with degrees from 8 different institutions), while 2 extra interviews were secured through snowball sampling upon direct recommendation by interviewees (one parent, and one ‘expert’ interview with the leader of independent parenting workshops, also of Moroccan origin). All interviewees had

professional jobs reflective of their high education level.

Reflections on research design

This research design came with several advantages, whilst also having some limitations. To begin with, this recruitment method involved choosing individuals based on their surname. While this was, arguably, more reliable than other approaches, it did mean that there was not full certainty that all people contacted were of Moroccan origin. For instance, it emerged during two interviews that the individuals in question did not quite fit my criteria, with one having taken the surname of a partner of Moroccan origin, and another whose family had Kurdish origins. Therefore, although a total of 17 interviews were conducted, only 15 are included as my data sample (including the additional two recruits from snowball sampling). Moreover,

approaching interviewees through the ‘highly educated’ route meant that I could not know exactly how they related to the Netherlands: while most participants were born and brought up in the Netherlands, two had migrated to join their parents in the Netherlands as teenagers, while two others had been raised in the Netherlands and then migrated as adults to Morocco for work. The majority of individuals had two parents of Moroccan origin, while two had one Moroccan and one ‘native’ Dutch parent. Overall, this diversity is in keeping with my goal to move away from arbitrary definitions of ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ generations of migrants, and rather, to see participants as sharing a history of family migration and associating with both ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Dutch’ heritage.

In terms of representativity, the online method both opened up and closed off some horizons. On the one hand, it opened the possibility to interview people from across the country from a

9_{I used the top 10 surnames of Moroccan origin listed on Forebears, a website which pools international}

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21 range of professions. Approaching people in-person would have geographically limited my search to Amsterdam (the city in which I am based), while LinkedIn allowed me to contact people much more broadly. While all participants had been educated in the highly urban Randstad area (which most now live still live near), several grew up further afield in small towns and villages, including in the south of the country. This provided a broad rural, urban, and geographical range of experiences. Moreover, my selection criteria essentially randomised the professions of participants, which may have been narrowed if I had relied on face-to-face snowball sampling. The outcome is that the job titles of interviewees ranged from senior

consultants to IT systems specialists, from social workers to municipality department managers. While I do not claim that this small sample is representative of all highly educated Moroccan Dutch people, a wide variety of stories were gathered, enabling me to weave a rich tapestry of experiences. On the other hand, my potential sample was clearly limited to LinkedIn users. While the site did provide access to hundreds of thousands of university and hogeschool alumni, it is worth considering that since this is a careers networking site, members might be more likely to be on the move between careers, or seeking international opportunities (since a significant proportion of profiles were written in English).

Moreover, conducting research online has slightly different ethical implications to face-to-face research. Virtual communications and interviews can in fact benefit participants’ experience of the research process: Hanna (2012) notes that video and phone interviews offer more

interviewee control over the process, especially on a practical level. This creates more equality in the researcher-‘researched’ power dynamic – something which reflexive sociologists have been wrestling with in recent years (Burgess-Proctor, 2015, cited in Meierdirk, 2017, p.555). Increased participant control was especially pertinent in the COVID-19 context, where most interviewees were juggling new roles, from full-time childcare to caring for their vulnerable parents. The ability to easily postpone our arranged conversation to a more suitable time or day (which several did) likely increased interviewees’ willingness to take part. On the flip side, recruiting participants online can blur lines of consent regarding the use of personal

information (Deakin & Wakefield, 2014). In this research, since LinkedIn profiles are technically public, I had access to large amounts of personal information alike to a CV. However, given that this was only available to me in the context of networking, I did not treat this as consent;

instead, I only used information provided to me in the context of the interview (following explicit verbal consent to record and transcribe) as data for my research.

My own personal characteristics will also have impacted the way I came across to participants. The fact that I am a non-Dutch, English-speaking international student (from the UK) did create a language barrier at times. While some potential interviewees were dissuaded from taking part

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22 after learning that we could not communicate in Dutch or Arabic, this only occurred in three instances. The final participants spoke a high level of English, with many using it regularly in professional settings, seeming at ease expressing themselves. Although there were moments where people paused to search for words or to translate a Dutch saying, this rarely interrupted the flow of the conversation, and indeed in some cases encouraged a more detailed description of their thoughts.10_{Overall, while my sample was biased towards those who had a good level of} English, I do not believe this significantly limited the range of experiences I encountered or hindered my participants’ ability to communicate their feelings.

Interestingly, having an Arabic surname (due to my grandfather having migrated to the UK from Egypt), and being a non-Dutch international student, both had advantages in distancing me from the white-Dutch ‘norm’, which may have facilitated participants who occasionally referred to ‘the Dutch’ from an outside perspective. Indeed, multiple interviewees asked about my family’s migration history with interest, often to check on what level I could relate to them, as

exemplified in the following exchange with Farida, talking about her sister’s advice on Islamic parenting techniques:

She’s like, giving me advice like, you can say dua [prayers] before you go to sleep – and – I don’t know if you know? Because your name is Hussein from – so I think you are? [laughs] what is your background?

While moments like this did clarify that I have a different and more mixed family background to theirs, they also demonstrate that some saw me as able to partially relate to their experiences. Moreover, in a context of high public stereotyping of parents of Moroccan origin (see Literature Review), these features may have lessened my risk of coming across as part of the

‘establishment’ or ‘public’ seeking to pass judgement on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ parenting.

The added characteristic of being a female-presenting researcher may also have encouraged rapport with some participants. In light of research showing that ‘all interviews are gendered contexts’ (Williams & Heikes, 1993, p.290), I am conscious that dominant socio-cultural ideas about gender roles can be reflected in researcher-participant interactions. For instance, childcare is still considered to be mostly female territory in the Netherlands, especially among communities with more strict gender-role expectations (see Chapter I for detail – although note that most participants actively distanced themselves from gender roles they perceived as unequal). While there is no way of knowing for certain, this may have helped participants to feel

10_{There were two interviewees who had a lower level of English relative to the others and spent longer}

searching for words, but in both cases this did not seem to make them uncomfortable, and we found ways around this together, including me suggesting words and adding clarification questions, and mutually laughing about the situation.

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23 at ease in talking about parenting to a female researcher if they had a baseline assumption that I understood these topics, something which I also encouraged in occasionally mentioning my past childcare work and actively reacting with parents to situations they described, such as laughing at funny stories, or showing compassion for struggles and conflict.

Following the feminist research paradigm, which argues that a researcher is never independent of the research they produce (Meierdirk, 2017), and Bourdieu’s call for sociologists to apply constant ‘reflexivity’ (cited in Kenway & McLeod, 2004), it is important to acknowledge that this research was also a personal journey: my interest in parenting is motivated in part by seeking to understand my own family’s negotiations of cultural differences and mixed belonging, and by my investment in socio-political activism to counter xenophobic, racialised, and culturalised stereotypes of ‘non-Western’ migrants and their descendants in Europe. I believe these personal motivations do not detract from an (unreachable) goal of ‘objectivity’ in sociological research; rather, when combined with rigorous analysis, they add value and dedication to representing people’s experiences with respect and authenticity.

Operationalising ‘strategies’ and ‘performances’

Interviews were approached in a semi-structured fashion, where the order and emphasis of questions was determined within the context of each interview, following participants’ lead. This flexibility was linked to the fact that I was most interested in how, rather than what, people said about parenting (see the discussion of a narrative approach in the Theoretical Framework). Nevertheless, parenting ‘strategies’ and ‘performances’ are both relatively ambiguous and expansive topics, which needed to be operationalised to refer to concrete moments in parenting. A key topic of discussion was upbringing: asking participants to describe their upbringing, and to compare their preferred strategies to their parents’. One focus-point was disciplining

strategies, to enable access to everyday examples of parenting, and to gain people’s perspectives on one of the most frequently stereotyped and criticised aspects of so-called ‘Moroccan’

parenting (see Chapter I). Narratives on ‘performing’ parenting to others were accessed through questions on discipline, affection, and parenting courses (which proved surprisingly insightful in discussing notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parenting), among others. Similarly insightful on ‘strategies’ and ‘performances’ were questions on public situations, such as supermarket trips and family gatherings. When language emerged in early interviews as a potential site to perform belonging, this was added to later interviews as a key topic. In addition, discussing the impact of

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24 COVID-19 on daily life and relations offered a way to build rapport and empathy throughout interviews.11

In keeping with the goal to avoid imposing categorisations of ‘Moroccan’ or ‘Dutch’, interview questions did not directly ask participants to make statements on national or cultural

comparisons; rather, when participants brought up these topics at their own initiative, I followed up with additional questions using their chosen terminology. One potential weakness in my chosen questions was that when asking participants about the family they grew up with, I occasionally used the phrase ‘family background’, which I later became aware is sometimes used in the Dutch context to mean country of origin, as opposed to the broader way in which I intended it. This may have signposted to some interviewees that I was interested in their relation to their heritage within parenting ideas. However, since there turned out to be little difference between the style of answers of those who did and did not hear this phrase, it does not seem this had a significant impact.

An important layer within the narrative approach is the context of the interviews themselves, all of which were virtual (with 15 interviews conducted via video call and 2 via voice call).12

Although the rise of video interviewing is often deemed a poor substitute to ‘traditional’ in-person interviewing, it is in many ways an untapped resource in its own right, and not only for practical and ethical reasons (Deakin & Wakefield, 2014). For instance, media scholars have emphasised video calling as a rich site of performance analysis, since the ‘grammar of being touch’ involves ‘joint seeing’ (Harper, 2016, pp.357-58), which can also involve power

dynamics: the ‘show-er’ in an interaction becomes a ‘mundane video director’, holding power over what the viewer can see and react to at any one time (Licoppe & Morel, 2014).

This interactive and ‘effortful’ process (Share, Williams & Kerrins, 2018) regularly played out in my own interviews, for instance, when Amro turned his phone around to show me his new workspace next to his ‘hobby’ space, to emphasise the fact that he now spends most of his time in once space, or when Karima’s two sons (aged four and five) came into the room and she introduced them to me by tilting the camera towards them, saying, ‘these kids also want to check you out’. The video format allowed participants to bring me into their home, consciously introducing me to elements of their life that I would not have been able to interact with had we

11_{A full list of interview questions can be provided upon request. Given that questions were tailored}

based on participants’ parental status and answers within the interview, no participant was asked all possible questions, or the exact same combination of questions.

12_{Interviews were organised on the free software of Skype, Zoom, WhatsApp video call or WhatsApp}

voice call, all of which are commonly used in work and family contexts, especially during COVID-19 social distancing measures.